SOURCE: "Semiotic Excess, Semantic Vacuity and the Photograph of the Imaginary: The Interplay of Realism and the Fantastic in Kafka's Die Verwandlung," in Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, Vol. 65, No. 2, June, 1991, pp. 304-17.

In the following essay, Murphy discusses Kafka's mingling of modes of realistic and fantastic representation in The Metamorphosis.

"Nature hath no outline
 but Imagination has"

(Blake)

I

True to the peculiar hermeneutics associated with his literary works Kafka's poetological utterances are both very infrequent and usually terse and indirect, taking on that familiar paradoxical form which characterizes the articulation of anything resembling a 'statement' in his writing. Approached with the necessary caution however, certain of these utterances provide an interesting perspective firstly on the difficult problem of determining Kafka's poetics of representation and secondly on the complex relationship of his literary works both to the tradition of realism and to the fantastic...